A jury in Jackson County in the United States awarded Susann Bashir $5 million in punitive damages in her discrimination lawsuit
The Kansas City Star newspaper reported that the award appears to be the largest jury verdict for a workplace discrimination case in Missouri.
Bashir said her work environment became hostile immediately after she converted in 2005, with her co-workers making harassing comments about her religion and referring to her hijab as “that thing on her head”.
“I was shocked,” she told the newspaper. “I thought, ‘What is going on?’. Nobody ever cared what I wore before. Nobody ever cared what religion I was before.”
Bashir worked at ATT’s Kansas City office for 10 years as a fiber optics network builder before being fired from her $70,000-a-year job in 2008. She said she endured religious discrimination nearly every day of the final three years she worked there, including being asked if she was going to blow up the building and being called a “towelhead” and a terrorist.
Bashir said she called an employee helpline in March 2005 and asked the company to provide sensitivity training for her co-workers. “It was a worthless call,” she said. “Nothing ever changed.”
The harassment continued and in March 2008, the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission launched an investigation after she filed a complaint. She said that made some workers angry and led to the final encounter with her boss.
Bashir said she became so stressed that she couldn’t return to work. She asked that her boss be removed or that she be transferred, but neither happened. She was fired after not returning to work for nine months.
She said the incident tore her family apart. She is going through a divorce and in October she and her daughter moved to Alaska, where she now works as an apartment manager. “I have mixed feelings,” Bashir said. “I’m happy not to be reporting to that management structure. But it’s hard in this economy to find a job with that level of compensation. I didn’t want to lose my job.”
ATT said it disagrees with the verdict and plans to appeal.
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